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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27598714">Gloom</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/unrivaled_tapestry/pseuds/unrivaled_tapestry'>unrivaled_tapestry</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Irreplaceable [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Disturbing Themes, Epilogue, Execution, M/M, Nightmares, Temporary Character Death, kind of, light gore</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-11-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-07 00:40:13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,573</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27598714</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/unrivaled_tapestry/pseuds/unrivaled_tapestry</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Claude knows better than to dwell on what could have been. His subconscious hasn't gotten the message.</p><p>Epilogue for "Irreplaceable". Claude and Lorenz navigating their new relationship after almost losing one another.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Lorenz Hellman Gloucester/Claude von Riegan</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Irreplaceable [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2017652</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>71</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Gloom</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>After finishing "Irreplaceable", I rediscovered this short coda I wrote and thought it was Not Bad so decided to throw it up on AO3 to celebrate finishing the fic.</p><p>Warning for Claude having a nightmare in the beginning and some disturbing/death imagery around that, but it's all right by the end.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Claude didn’t know why he left the prison through the debtor’s door, or why the courtyard was empty.</p><p>Or, mostly empty. At the center, he could make out a looming wooden structure. Deceptively delicate and open sided, with rough rigging draped over its timber ribs. He recognized it—the dreaded gallows outside Leicester Prison cast a shadow over all of Derdriu, spiritually if not in stature. Though now it was larger, possessing more angles and support beams and staircases than he remembered.</p><p>His confusion urged him forwards, to try and get a better look, because he had some sense that he was supposed to be there, that there was something he had forgotten.</p><p>Then he saw the body.</p><p>Crowned with a white cap, a dead man swung under the scaffold. His still body swayed with the wind catching on his dirtied clothes in the breeze, and he was held in place by a thick noose caught tight under his jaw.</p><p>Claude knew—even as his confused heart started thundering with the urge to get there, to touch him, to cut him down—that the man hanging there had been dead for some time now. The only thing he’d find under that torn lilac coat was a deathly cold and the knowledge of a world permanently fractured and much poorer.</p><p>Realizations and half-memories fell in line, each one of them the blade of a knife in his gut.</p><p>He’d told them the sentence was exile. He’d told them not to—</p><p>His throat ached around a scream that never made it out. He started running, though his path wobbled and waved, the distance impossible to determine, and he couldn’t tell if his legs weren’t working because of the ground under them or the fiery sick feeling at the top of his throat, the dense, wild panic that grew with every step he took.</p><p>“On your orders, Your Grace,” said a man in armor that hadn’t been there a moment before.</p><p>“Not my order.” He spoke, or tried to, but the words tumbled off his tongue as clumsily as they would from a drunk’s gullet. Claude’s heart raced as he stumbled over to the structure, his toes catching on the moving, chipped flagstones. “That <em>wasn’t</em> my order.”</p><p>He stopped at the body, too familiar, and he paused for a few gasping seconds as he tried to find the right place to put his hands. The knowledge that he could no longer make it worse at war with the need to apologize, to find some soft reverence for the body of a man who hadn’t deserved to die.</p><p>“Claude?”</p><p>Claude looked up, shredded fabrics raking his cheek as he pressed it into a rigid stomach. It wasn’t possible.</p><p>“It’s so dark in here.”</p><p>Claude gulped down a box of tacks. He knew the voice coming from under the muslin cap. His right arm kept holding the corpse to him, even as his shuddering free hand crawled towards the hood.</p><p>“Are you all right?”</p><p>He squeezed his eyes shut, fingers finding traction on the fabric, which was smooth like silk. With a desperate sob, he pulled it downwards.</p><p> </p><p>“Ow!”</p><p>Claude opened his eyes. He was in the dark, loose clothes chilled by a cold sweat as his unfinished cry died in his throat and turned into a gasp of cool air instead. Dim moonlight barely illuminated his study, and he saw Lorenz staring at him, confused, and slightly annoyed.</p><p>“Claude?!” He lifted one sleepy hand around Claude’s wrist. “What are you <em>doing</em>?”</p><p>Claude took one breath, two, and discovered that his hand was fisted tightly in the longest cut of Lorenz’s hair. Lorenz had his head awkwardly pulled to the side to take some of the pressure off of Claude’s vice-like hold, and his expression was the sleepy in-between of bleeriness and the pain of a knot stuck in his brush.</p><p>Claude pried his stiff knuckles loose. He let Lorenz’s hair slip through his fingers, his chest loosening with terrible relief like a wash of faith magic in battle.</p><p>“That’s better,” Lorenz said, his head and shoulders rolling back onto the rise of the settee. His hand not pinned underneath Claude reached up to pat his hair down.</p><p>“<em>Lorenz</em>,” Claude spoke with raspy, aching surprise and turned away. He let his head fall onto his lover’s chest, feeling like a cold lead weight as he pressed his ear into the fabric. “Sorry. I was dreaming.”</p><p>“Oh, really?” Lorenz said, voice sharpening, though still thick with sleep. “I couldn’t tell.” He let out a heavy breath under Claude, and Claude fought the urge to let his hand come up to the other side of Lorenz’s ribcage, to feel as much of him as he could. But they were still figuring out the particulars of their sleeping arrangement, so he stayed where he was. “It didn’t seem like a kind one.”</p><p>Claude paused. What could he even say? “<em>I thought I was holding your dead body in my arms</em>.” “<em>I dreamed about you hanging.</em>” Lorenz didn’t need to know. He said it didn’t bother him...but Claude wasn’t so sure.</p><p>Yet, he didn’t want to lie. Things were still so new, so fragile between them—they were fighting a war, possibly two, and they both still vividly remembered cruelty from one another. That half the time it had been something else wearing their faces was a different matter entirely. He didn’t want to guess wrong.</p><p>He sucked in a breath through his nose. What if it had been a mistake to try so soon after everything? What if—</p><p>Claude threw out a smile he didn’t feel and said, “Why, Lorenz, it was a fine dream. Got a little carried away is all. Guess I’ve been thinking about pulling your hair.”</p><p>Instead of smiling back, or offering some little scowl and an admonishing blush, Lorenz’s face fell. It was barely a chip in the porcelain, but Claude noticed, and instantly knew he’d made the wrong call.</p><p>“I was talking in my sleep, wasn’t I?”</p><p>“I wasn’t going to <em>say</em> it, but yes.” Lorenz let out a sigh that Claude felt in his chest. “Again?”</p><p>Claude gave two weak nods.</p><p>“Sorry my brain keeps killing you.” In the worst ways it could imagine.</p><p>“I suppose it’s par for the course,” Lorenz said. “And it’s better than my erstwhile double stabbing you a second time.”</p><p>Claude resisted the urge to check the new scar over his gut. “It is definitely <em>not</em> better.”</p><p>“I say it is.” Above, Lorenz’s mouth dipped into a frown. “You don’t need to hide your nightmares, no matter their crimes against me. We have begun a new chapter together, and I wish to know what troubles you.”</p><p>Claude wished he could believe that were true, that he could tell Lorenz about every time he’d died in Claude’s mind without that eventually becoming one more sticking point on a whole hill of them.</p><p>Behind him, Lorenz hesitantly slid his hand up Claude’s back, pausing just at the base of his neck before quickly diving his palm into Claude’s hair to rub at his scalp. This, too, was new for them, and Claude pushed past the oddness of being so close to another, the fear of relaxing into someone’s hand on him, and tried to let the jagged edges leftover from his dream fade into the pleasant itch around the tips of Lorenz’s fingers.</p><p>“I’m here, Claude. You don’t have to do this alone.” Lorenz’s heartbeat was steady under Claude’s ear, and Claude closed his eyes. Normally, he’d scramble up to his chair, fire up the oil lamp on his desk and try to get some work done. It was easier, at least, to imagine falling asleep back asleep with Lorenz there, knowing that he was safe.</p><p>They lay in silence for a while, Claude draped over Lorenz and Lorenz gently, if uncertainly massaging Claude’s neck and carding through his hair.</p><p>“Claude,” Lorenz’s hand paused in place. “Are you truly so haunted by something you didn’t do?”</p><p>And maybe he wasn’t any more disturbed than he would be if he’d nearly lost Lorenz some other way—Lorenz in a pool of blood was also a frequent fixture in Claude’s nightmares.</p><p>That didn’t stop him from the feeling that he should have done more. Been quicker, more clever, not been used as a weapon against someone dear to him. The means and metaphor meant nothing—the point was that Lorenz could have died, and Claude could have prevented it.</p><p>He <em>did</em> prevent it. That didn’t stop Claude from thinking that <em>Lorenz</em> was haunted, too, no matter what he said. Claude wasn’t the only one who talked in his sleep.</p><p>“Sure seems like I’d know better than to do that to myself.” Claude pressed his free hand to his forehead, until it traced back, finding the back of Lorenz’s hand. “Sorry for waking you. Come on. You might not need your beauty sleep, but I do.”</p><p>Claude picked out a badly hidden smile in the dim light. Some of the ice left his spine.</p><p>So he let his arm drape across Lorenz, and Lorenz’s hand pressed between his shoulders as he shifted under Claude, sinking further into the couch and turning his nose into the back of it for the little extra hint of shadow.</p><p>Claude fell back asleep listening to the steady tick of Lorenz’s heart and the rhythm of his breath.</p>
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